The background description provided herein is for the purpose of generally presenting the context of the disclosure. Unless otherwise indicated herein, the materials described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
Advances in integrated circuit, computing, networking and related technologies have led to widespread adoption of mobile computing devices, such as, smartphones and tablet computers (hereafter simply “mobile device”). Mobiles devices are often employed to provide navigation services, and many mobile devices may include global positioning system (GPS) components to enable the provision of navigation services. However, GPS based navigation systems typically require signals from multiple satellites simultaneously to provide exact position and elevation information within few meters; which may be limited within high rise buildings/structures, as the building/structure, improvements therein, and/or furniture often block the satellite signals, especially in interior sections away from the windows. As a result, current GPS navigation systems in smartphones are typically very imprecise, when the smartphones are located inside high rise buildings/structures (hereinafter, simply, buildings). While the smartphones may provide approximate assessments based on their last known locations, in general, their navigational abilities are so in exact that a few floors can stand between the goal they indicate and the actual one, making current smartphones poor entities for providing navigation service indoor, especially within a high-rise building. This could pose a challenge, for example, to emergency responders (E911) responding to an emergency in a high rise building. The emergency responders may be able to determine only the ground level location of caller, but not the floor the caller is on.